I n P r act ic e
John Verity places his
Blue Bottle
pedal
after
his
Blackbird
tube preamp. This way the
Blue Bottle
is
working purely to boost the output level of the
Blackbird
, rather than being used to push the input
tube stage of the
Blackbird
into saturation. He then
uses the ‘Hi-Cut’ filter to take some top-end off and
smooth out his guitar tone. Applying low-pass
filtering at the end of the signal chain also has the
advantage of reducing hiss and high frequency
noise as far as possible in his rig.
Tone Tip!
To create the last word in all-tube preamp
rigs we recommend placing the
Fire Bottle pickup
booster pre-
Blackbird
and the
Blue Bottle
post-
Blackbird
. This setup allows for an unprecendented
degree of tone shaping possibilities for guitar .
C o nt ro l s
Mid Boost
knob adjusts the level of middle
frequencies centered about the 500Hz point relative
to highs and lows. With the knob set fully
aniticlockwise the frequency response of the
Blue
Bottle
is essentially flat and the pedal instroduces
very little, if any tonal colouration. Rotating the knob
clockwise gradually increases the level of the mids
adding some welcome girth to the tone of single coil
pickups whilst retaining their unique sonic
characteristics. With the knob set fully clockwise the
Blue Bottle
adds up to 12dB of pure tube mid-boost
which can be used to great effect on a
Fender
®
Stratocaster™ type guitar enabling it to sing and
sustain like a
Gibson
®
‘Les Paul’ or even ‘335’.